Former KKK Leader Applauds Tucker Carlson for Calling White Supremacy a ‘Hoax’

Former KKK Leader Applauds Tucker Carlson for Calling White Supremacy a ‘Hoax’

Tucker Carlson spent a chunk of his show on Tuesday night calling white supremacy a “hoax” and denying that it is even a problen in the United States.

On Wednesday he had his view validated by…one of America’s most well-known white supremacists? Okay.

Can’t imagine this is the kind of support Carlson was looking for. Or maybe it was:

Carlson on Tuesday made a point of saying that Trump never “endorsed” white supremacy. But he does not need to have specifically endorsed David Duke or the Ku Klux Klan to be considered a white supremacist. His politics and worldview are white supremacist in both the academic sense of defining “white supremacy” as a system of structural racism that benefits white people at the expense of minorities, and in the coded language he uses about, for example, “invasions” of the U.S. by undocumented migrants from predominantly Hispanic countries.

It is this worldview that appears to have motivated the shooter who killed 22 people in El Paso last weekend. The manifesto he allegedly posted online before the shooting is chock full of classic white supremacist rhetoric that Trump has aped for years. And his urge to kill Hispanics because he fears they are invading Texas and making white people a minority fits right in with Duke’s apparent belief that white people are in danger of being destroyed by an ever-diversifying population.

Another way of putting all this is that if Tucker Carlson wants to deny the existence and salience of white supremacy to today’s politics, he could note who seems to agree with him and why. But he won’t.

Gary Legum

Gary Legum has written about politics and culture for Independent Journal Review, Salon, The Daily Beast, Wonkette, AlterNet and McSweeney's, among others. He currently lives in his native state of Virginia.

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